


The moon and the stars

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Established Relationship, Fantasy, Folklore, Immortality, Love, Love Letters, M/M, Magic, Mythology - Freeform, This fic will leave you mildly confused because writing it sure left me mildly confused, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:00:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29085030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: In the aftermath of the end of the world, love letters are songs in the wind and lines in stone, rows and rows and rows of trees and rivers carving into earth.Written for Karushuu Week 2021 on tumblr.
Relationships: Akabane Karma/Asano Gakushuu
Comments: 25
Kudos: 61





	The moon and the stars

**Author's Note:**

> Please do NOT ask me what is going on in this fic because I will NOT be able to tell you either  
> [Karushuu Week 2021](https://karushuu--week.tumblr.com/post/639125461973254144/2021-prompts)
> 
> kljhgjkljh i went... wild with an idea and way too much prose I'm sorry
> 
> Me, having not written anything for tomorrow's prompt: hehe

**Karushuu Week 2021 Day 6: Envelopes/Love Letters**

**_To a memory I can no longer recall;_ **

**I.**

Millennia after the civilization that Karma once loved falls, he finds himself back there again. 

It’s been a few thousand years past, and a few thousand years have brought metal back to dust, and cliffs back to stone; landmasses have shifted, splitting apart the shape of the land that Karma had once recognized, and melding them back together again. 

Human hubris often think that the greatest age of their era would be the time of prosperity but the truth of the matter is that those golden years are fleeting - what lasts the longest is the time it takes for their monuments to turn back to sand and dust; it was only a few centuries ago that the last stone that marked A'ic-sa had been finally ground to nothingness, but they have lasted so many hundreds of centuries prior. 

Karma grew up here, on this small archipelago of islands, which is why he has such fond memories of the place. Back before he fully understood Earth and the Start and the End, when he was still a naïve child...

It’s been so long since, and the only reason Karma has memories to go by is because...-

There, carved into the face of the mountain facing east, is script written in the Karma’s native text in a language long-dead. _I Love You_.

A smile tugs at his lips. It’s been there long enough that the edges of the text have rounded by weather, recent enough that Karma can picture _him_ standing there, dragging his pen across the slate until he was satisfied at his calligraphy, writing words that nobody but Karma will be able to read.

**II.**

Karma lets himself stay on the islands for a while (a year), tracing the strokes of _kanji_ onto his skin to memorize his beloved's handwriting. 

In that year he walks from one end to another and he comes across - it’s unrecognizable by any human sense, but Karma steps onto new soil heaped on old soil, and he knows - his hometown. 

Through his trek around the islands he picks up berries and flowers and leaves. He lays them all together and selects his few favorites, and then he goes back around the islands to find more of them. 

In his hometown he tills out a good plot of land on a nice section of hill, and he rakes down grooves for mountain streams to trickle down into a lake, and run over his tilled soil for his plants to grow. Over the land he plants a seed, in which he imbues just a little bit of energy into. He feels that energy through the ground around them… birds start singing a little bit louder, the plants shiver. 

Karma plants another seed, and then another.

**III.**

Karma slowly makes his way through what was once a single continent next to the islands, now cleaved into two. He walks from the shoreline down to follow the rising sun, and he passes by a little settlement. Karma waits for nightfall that day to catalogue the stars as his landmark, so he knows where to return to check up on it’s progress - if they’re lucky, Karma would be able to hear of their exploits from across the world without having to track them on a bored century. 

(The stars will not stay static, but they’ve been here long before Karma has been here and they’ll be here long after Karma goes. Karma is to them, that humans are to him.)

Karma continues on, until he reaches a river. He follows that river upstream until he reaches a mountain, and then he scales the mountain until he reaches a spring.

Then he looks out into the world below and he sees the way the waterfalls and rushing rapids carve through the earth into the shape of a heart. 

**IV.**

It's in the middle of the biting sandstorm that Karma gets an idea. 

The desert around him glimmer in same golden shade of _his_ hair - or rather, the shade that Karma has memorized most vividly. They can take many forms, the both of them.

The wind howls unforgivingly into the endless expanse of white sand; sunlight beats down. 

With strokes of a brush Karma sweeps the sand dunes into smooth planes, he scolds the wind (who twinkles with laughter at him, and spins circles to mess at his work). 

Sometime in the last century had the winds had blown hard enough to reveal a rocky outcrop under where used to be a dried up oasis. Karma commanders it, carving ridges and curves and drilling nice round holes he knows will eventually crumble in themselves. 

But before that, in the sand where he's drawn lines and lines and lines, is a song. 

Sheet music. Sand music? 

The wind twirls and tumbles in his hair. 

"A lullaby," Karma says. "What I used to sing to him."

Karma's molded an ocarina. The wind trills and sings with the instrument and the song floats through the storm, drifting down to the place where the sand and the grass meet, and then further down the rolling plains of hills.

**V.**

When they finally meet at the ends of the earth, it's back at the End, at the Start - at Karma's hometown which was his too, where war begin and ended and where they drowned and surfaced. 

"Gakushuu," Karma breathes, and Gakushuu laughs bright and loud, his voice twinkling like a tapestry of stars.

"I missed you," Gakushuu says, tangling his fingers in Karma's hair. 

Today, Karma's hair is bright red; like the blood they spilled on the battlefield before they realized they could never die, like the hot center of the sun that sets and rises every day, like the very first time they've ever met-

Gakushuu's eyes are violet, like the littlest buds of flowers that snaked their way past bones and bloomed at the slightest touch of sunlight, like the softest part of the galaxy when the sky is dark, like-

"I missed you," Karma says.

"Me too," Gakushuu says. 

"I want to show you something," Karma says.

Then they're back at the very beginning, the place where Karma grew up, went to school, made some friends, lost some friends, died, breathed, fell in love.

The part of the rock that Gakushuu has carved his love in all those hundreds of years ago has grown and crumbled and grown over again, and it is now a pattern of trees and ice that trace the skyline. 

Karma brings him to (the lands have shifted again, just ever so little) a forest, and Gakushuu looks overhead.

" _Sakura_ ," he gasps. "I haven't seen these in forever."

"I haven't seen you in forever," Karma says.

"I have many things to tell you about," Gakushuu says. 

"Me too," Karma says. "Stay with me."

"Of course," Gakushuu says. "Longer, this time."

Longer, time, but Karma can't tell time - not when every second with Gakushuu feels like a hundred years, and every minute without feels like a second. When you're not bound by time, what time do you remember? There is no AD or BC, no before or after, and Karma does not remember which civilization falls and rises with respect to another, but he remembers being with Gakushuu, and being without.

(They're human, fifteen, underneath a cherry blossom tree. They're holding hands. Karma rubs his thumb over Gakushuu's wrist and he feels a pulse, Gakushuu's heart going beat, beat, beat,

Karma doesn't remember anything after that but he remembers that)

(the boy with eyes the color of stardust looks at Karma and there and then Karma knows that he's not the only one; if he is here then more will come and more will follow;-

but now they're schoolchildren, and Karma meets him in the center of the school courtyard and)

they wake up tangled in a bed of flowers. 

Karma only sleeps when he's with Gakushuu, otherwise he doesn't sleep, he doesn't need to sleep. But when he holds Gakushuu in his arms his heartbeat slows and his eyelids grow drowsy and he just wants to hold Gakushuu in his arms and not move.

He thinks of these moments when they're apart, and when they're apart it's for their own good. Can you spend an eternity with the same person, when you're the only two people left in the world?

They wax and wane like the pull of the moon and the tides, where Karma can feel Gakushuu even when they're far apart, 

and they are like the sun meeting the horizon, when fire burns bright into the sky, and if the sun stayed there forever the earth would not move. The sun meets the horizon every day, and every day it is a new sight, and Karma lives forever (he will live forever) and he will see an infinity more of sunsets but each one takes his breath away. 

If Karma is like the hot center of the sun that sets and rises every day, like the very first time they've ever met, Gakushuu-

-is like everything Karma has ever wanted.

**_breathless, breathless_ **

A little bit more explaining my thought process/attempt at lore for this lmao:  
\- this takes place at some undetermined point in the very far off future, when canon century as we know it is nothing but a speck in the dust  
\- Karma and Gakushuu both grew up in Japan. Whether or not the canon events happen is up to you.  
\- They are both minor gods/immortal beings of some sort roaming the earth, and they will continue to do so until something big happens/the end of the world  
\- speaking of something big happening, the idea was that at some point in time, some sort of god-war breaks out. Karma and Gakushuu are of course involved in it, and they survive.  
\- Barely.   
\- Them staying apart for long periods of time + coming back together every once in a while was something I thought of - if you and someone else were the only two people left in the world, would you be able to see them forever? Despite best efforts, you'd probably end up sick of each other at some point.   
\- So you go off on your own, take your time to wander and see the sights, see how everything has changed and evolved and moved and grown. And then suddenly you miss your partner, you have so much to tell them, and when you meet up again it's like seeing them for the first time.  
\- Distance makes the heart grow fonder, or something like that.   
\- And a century ago you two were arguing over something mundane, and you're glad you have time to yourself now, to stretch your legs and breathe some cool air and go see the mountaintop that your partner didn't want to. Now everything reminds you of them and you think, "I want to show them this!"   
\- So you write them love letters wherever you go. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is it, thank you


End file.
